Welcome friends, how are you? In this video post we are going to explain how to stop Search engine crawlers from crawling our website?

Have you stopped search engine crawlers from indexing or crawling your website unknowingly or by mistake? Let me remind you this is the third video of WordPress audit. Have you gone through my previous video posts? If not, kindly go through it for better understanding of website audit. We are going to discuss Indexing. Let me make it clear what is Indexing? When crawler comes on your website and you allow it to index. This means that you allow crawlers to fetch the data of the website for saving it on the database of Google or any other search engine’s server. This is the actual meaning of indexing. But when you stop indexing of the site so that users get live data of the site upon request. There can be various reasons for stopping indexing.

First of all we must know the difference between indexing and listing. If we are stopping indexing or not allowing crawlers to index our site that doesn’t mean that we are stopping listing our website on Google. How site will be listed on Google but data present on the site will not be indexed. So now it must be clear as to what is the difference between indexing and listing.

Reasons Why we Stop Indexing Our website?

The first reason is the website design mode. Suppose if your site is not complete and is in design mode. If there is dummy content or duplicate content on your website and you do not want crawler to index and save the data on Google’s DB or server. Since duplicate content can negatively impact the ranking of your website. So no one would wish for the same. So if there is dummy or duplicate content on the site, we discourage or stop crawlers from indexing our site. We are not asking Google, not to list our website on its database but we are asking Google or crawler not to index the data of our website. So we follow no index.

Second reason might be that our site might be in development mode. Maybe there are some programming errors and you do not want such errors to be crawled. Also if there is private data on your website. Suppose your website is a membership website with private data of the users. If Google crawls such data, it gets exposed and users can directly search and see such data leading to breach of privacy. So we stop indexing any folder where all the data are stored. So this is the way to stop search engine crawlers not to index data of the membership website.

If your website has a homepage data gets changed quite frequently. Suppose, Cricket score which is live and score gets changed every second. You do not want obsolete data to get indexed on Google’s DB. So there can be various reasons for stopping search engines from indexing the website.

How to Discourage Search Engine Crawlers to Index Websites?

If you are a WP user, when you go to the admin panel, settings you will get an option of Search Engine Visibility. If you click on it the whole site won’t be indexed. This is done during the design phase. So one must ensure that this is not clicked else it would be discouraged from indexing by search engines. Suppose if your website is not in rank even if there is unique content. So this is an important part of Website Audit if it’s not in rank. Also in the root folder there is a robot.txt file and we stop indexing any particular folder of the site if we wish. So we need to check if all the folders are disallowed. We must examine and check the error and problem from the root level. Suppose if your Laptop is not booting up, what do you do first. You don’t rush to get your laptop repaired. Instead you check the power cord, adapter, may be even the socket whether there is any power fault or not.

So the point is that if your site is not ranking don’t blame content or link building strategy. First check as may be search engine visibility might be discouraged and you might not be knowing. So this is the basic test which you need to check as a Website Audit. In the next video I will be back with my next audit point. I hope it must be clear what is indexing and listing now. If you have any related query kindly ask us. Kindly like, share and subscribe to our channel. If you want to learn Digital Marketing and have your own e-commerce website, affiliate marketing, register your business on GMB, do join our Digital Marketing Course as Zero to Hero. You can easily learn how to implement Digital Marketing Strategy and start earning online. So let us meet in my next post. Thank You!